Posted on 03/15/2006 2:02:56 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
There will be peace when the surviving Muslims repudiate jihad and dhimmitude.
How many do we want to survive?
This is not a question for us to answer, it is a question for the Muslims to answer.
The question for us to answer is: are we willing to submit, in any way, to Islam? The answer to that question is not no, it is HELL NO!
The other question for us to answer is do we have the long term political/social will to fight?
This is precisely what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence tell us, what the Koran and Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain of our own superior knowledge that human life is really about genes or neuroses or politics or nutrition, condescendingly look down on the true believer. Patronizing him like a child, we tell him that he doesn’t know that his own faith has been “hijacked” by “fundamentalists” who manipulate his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about his faith is a delusion, and that the true explanation is one that we advanced, sophisticated Westerners understand while the believer remains mired in superstition and neurotic fantasy.
What words of incredible wisdom ! Fascinating how the port deal apologists call everyone who questions it a 'racist' or a 'bigot' while it is they who reek of Great White Father condescension in assuming that their 'little brown brothers' admire and worship them and want to be just like them. They babble about the 'racism' of people who take it for granted that Muslims have their own value and priorities while they flatter themselves with the assumption that jihadism is a Muslim misunderstanding of Islam and they have some profound cultural and moral influence over the Muslim world. It is the height of arrogance to say that the Salafists have 'hijacked' Islam. The Salafists are pure Islam. We can't define Islam.
That's all I need to know about Islam.
These people will never be our "friends."
Every society and government that has taken us on, from Hitler and the warlords to the commissars in Hanoi to the Wahhabist zealots, has wagered on the same answer: no.
Only the North Vietnamese won their bet, and we made them pay for it. We wrecked them for the next 75 years. We gutted their cadres, killed them on the battlefields in huge numbers, wrecked their infrastructure, and generally did for their society what World War I did for Europe and the Civil War did for the American South.
They won their war and their bragging rights, courtesy of the U.S. Democratic Party, but none of their neighbors will need worry about them for the next 100 years.
That's certainly a valid point, but I don't think the opponents of the port deal really understood what was involved. I think they overestimated the dangers and caused the Senate to give an unnecessary rebuff to Gulf Arabs whose cooperation we will value a great deal in the future. I think the opposition was a mistake, frankly.
Yet within just a few years they occupied Laos, invaded and conquered Cambodia, and successfully defeated a Chinese invasion .
I don't think Vietnam was as devastated as you think. It is difficult to really thoroughly devastate third world countries. You can certainly kill people, but there aren't a lot of things there to break.
Vietnam is presently in an economic boom, imitating China.
Exactly. I believe two things: (1) Islam is incompatible with liberty, and (2) liberty cannot be imposed on those who have other commitments.
Their cadres are still dead.
Reminds me of an old "Wizard of Id" cartoon in the funny papers:
King (to prisoner): "Any final words?"
Prisoner (to King): "The death penalty doesn't work!"
King (to prisoner): "I'll believe that when I see you again."
Same thing with those North Vietnamese Communist true believers.
Saddam likewise gutted the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which is why the mullahs' control of Iran is compromised today.
A 25 year old (in 1975) Vietnamese commie is 55 years old today. Those who died in the war would largely have been replaced by now anyway.
Your point seems to be that the death of a lot of soldiers in war creates semi-permanent damage to a society, crippling it for decades or perhaps as long as a century.
This no doubt explains how Germany, which suffered enormous loss of life in WWI, especially among the officers and other cadre, came very close to conquering the world 20 years later.
Begs the question what are we now doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both these countries are Muslim and will continue to be so after we have left.
The goal of toppling Saddam achieved.
The question of WMD well whether they existed, or are in Syria under the control of either the Russians or some group are no longer under Saddam.
Iraq's infrastructure for creating WMD is wrecked.
So if we are in Iraq nation building then the answer has to be yes, otherwise we are wasting our time being over there.
I believe that is the point of the war-weary former supporters of the war in the States, that we can't win, these people are irredeemable, and we ought to start the genocide.
You're an imam now?
But warplanners and warfighters MUST answer the question, if only provisionally, because the wars they plan and fight are contingent on the answer.
The most important question, IMO, is WHY do our warplanners and warfighters believe Islam is reformable and capable of peaceful coexistence with civilization?
Do they believe it because it is true (or they think it true), or do they believe it because the only war they are prepared to fight presupposes it to be true?
War weary former supporters, we have only started in Iraq.
I hate told you so's.
But before we went in I pointed out on FR that toppling Saddam was the easy bit, if we were not ready to take on the hard part phase 4 pacification, stabilization and normalization we should never go into Iraq.
As for starting genocide.
That will never happen, after all you are on earth for what 80 years most, who wants to spend a eternity in hell because they were judged on that on judgment day, something many people on this site seem to forget.
How do you explain you killed millions of Gods children women children the elderly as well as the men, the unborn (would that be a abortion on a grand scale) because we perceived them to be a threat to our earthly existence.
Having given up entirely on ever living in peace with Muslims, what do you propose to do?
"...or do they believe it because the only war they are prepared to fight presupposes it to be true?"
That is well phrased. Of course, I don't know that anyone can know one way or another with certainty. What the cartoon jihad showed is that we are going to have to fight this war on the streets of Europe, Australia and probably America before it is over. And regardless of what one is willing to do bombing the hell out of London, etc. would be counter-productive.
This is a very serious problem, and it is getting worse. I don't think it is getting worse because we invaded Iraq, I just think invading Iraq did not really achieve the intended effect of quelling global jihad. The jihadists are not organized or centralized and they are working on their own timetables. We are not fighting them strongly enough in places like the Phillipines, not at all in Africa it seems, insufficiently in Thailand, etc. And esp. in Europe were people seem to be cowed, and Bush of course can barely bring himself to say "Islam" without following it up with "religion of peace".
I don't think (I certainly hope not, anyway) that we'll have to kill "all" the Muslims, but we really ought to get serious about killing the jihadis, not just the ones on the battlefield, but the ones in the jails also. The idea that Yale admitted a former taliban, and that the state dept. granted him a Visa shows just how pusillanimous we are being. I'm not saying that guy should be executed, but he sure as hell shouldn't be in the US.
I am critical of both of them for missing the chance to do this in 2001, when it WAS (briefly) possible.
Bush did not do it because he believes that It's a Small World After All. Rummy didn't do it because it would have cost him transformation and empowered his bureaucratic enemies, who are now retired instead of commanding Army Groups and Fleets.
Defeating global jihad requires territory to be seized and control of the children and grandchildren of the jihadis for at least 50 years.
Not enough people believe we can lose.
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